Whenever I found myself disappointed that Dragon Quest IV wasn’t taking its most interesting ideas very far, I had to stop and remind myself that I’m actually playing an NES game, and in that context it does feel remarkable. As much as the series would become known for playing it safe and sticking to its traditional conventions, at this point that’s not quite as true as it will be in twenty years. Surely the aesthetics are locked in, and the core interface is basically solved, but the format is still being played with in these NES era Dragon Quests. That first game is so revolutionary that iterations on its formula in all future RPGs make it feel fresh even today, 2 is a sprawling sequel in all the wrong ways, and 3 refines that approach to world exploration while adopting a diverse class system and the series staple episodic town story format. Dragon Quest IV’s innovations may be deceptive at first because they’re not gameplay-centric, more focused on stretching the limits of presentation on the NES. It definitely feels like a game where, having kind of done everything there is to do and conquered the world with the third one, now we’re just stretching our legs, getting playful, and a little bit more experimental in ways that are as fun as they are underwhelming at times. Regardless, keeping in mind through the shiny coat of paint and user-friendliness of the DS remake that this game came out in 1990 helps me swallow that disappointment even as that’s my primary vibe a lot of the time playing it.
Most of that feeling comes courtesy of this game’s big hook and, uh, name, is its chapter-based structure, where roughly the first half of the game is broken into four chapters that chronicle the adventures of your nameless Hero Character’s JRPG party as they pursue the personal missions that lead them to cross paths with you and join up when you finally take control of the main kid in chapter five. This is a novel concept, one that I wish had inspired other things more directly. This is the kind of idea that I feel should be brazenly stolen rather than referenced as a cool thing that one venerable beloved thing did. It’s pretty sick and IMPORTANTLY I don’t think it’s really taken advantage of as an idea.
There’s a degree to which this eases you into the game, starting you with a character who is really tanky with no access to magic and an optionally recruitable heal guy, chapter two giving you a balanced party, and chapter four skewing you heavily towards squishy mage characters against the toughest enemies yet (I’ll get back around to chapter 3). Each of these mini-adventures is fun, and cute, and they do a fun job of introducing you to various parts of the world and previews of their problems and cultures before you’ll eventually get the chance to really address them and visit them in the interconnected way that previous DQ games have, and watching that world map stitch itself together as you go through chapter 5 is genuinely special in a way I’m not sure any other game can replicate exactly. They do go on maybe a little bit too long, and starting every character flatly at level 1 in each scenario does tune things a little needlessly grindy in a series that hasn’t had any problem being breezy before now but has the dark cloud runtimes of games like DQ7 and 11 looming ever nearer.
The real issue I take with these chapters, however, is that they feel like wasted opportunities, largely because chapter 3 is such a unique standout compared to the rest. In chapter 3 you play as Torneko, a middle-aged merchant guy who has inexplicably become a mascot for the series and the star of the first ever Mystery Dungeon game, as he works at his small town’s weapons shop and dreams of one day opening his own. There IS a pretty normal DQ adventure here, sort of, but there’s not really an enemy you’re driving to defeat or a primary antagonist, and I spent a lot of time at the top of this chapter working at the shop for money. Guys come in and say hey will you sell me this item and I say yeah of course. Sometimes they come in and sell me a crossbow just like I’ve done a million times in these games, and I give them a good price. Sometimes a guy will come in and sell a REALLY nice sword and if I can afford it from my meager earning’s I’ll buy that and equip it myself to eliminate the need for the grind if I can, seeing as Torneko is not really a combat guy. He can inspect items though and appraise their value, maybe squeeze a few more coins out of them than they’re worth.
Because that’s his whole thing, while you are still diving through dungeons and stuff you’re doing it in service of raising funds to rent space for your storefront, to loot nice weapons and armor to fulfill an order, to stock your new store well enough to raise enough money to repair an important tunnel. The true final boss of the chapter is Getting Sixty Thousand Dollars. It’s rudimentary, as it necessarily had to be given the hardware the original version of the game was developed for, but it does succeed at playing out like an extremely prototypical version of the burgeoning item shop RPG genre, with a flavor unlike anything else in the game. It made it feel really weird that none of the other warmup chapters took the opportunity to try stuff like that; Ragnar is an important knight in active military service, but his mission puts him in a position to behave like a normal JRPG guy. Meena and Maya are professional performers, a fortuneteller and a famous dancer, who are seeking revenge for the murder of their father and their quest makes them cross some dangerous and important people, but they never try to use their professional credits to go undercover and get close to anyone of something; there’s no element of the context of their lives that plays into their story, we’re just told these things about them and then do a JRPG adventure with them for a few hours before we switch over to the main game.
It’s hard to hold these things against the game too much because as I’ve mentioned I do understand that I may be asking for a lot of complexity from a game that was probably already pushing at the seams of its hardware, and beyond that this is just a fun game. Everything that’s good about the writing and presentation in Dragon Quest 3 is still good here, better even a lot of the time. There are more creative puzzles and there’s better dungeon variety. So the fact that I spent this whole thing moaning shouldn’t indicate that I didn’t have a good time, only that I’m mourning the much more interesting game I got a brief taste of here that, to my knowledge, this series would never approach again.
Most of that feeling comes courtesy of this game’s big hook and, uh, name, is its chapter-based structure, where roughly the first half of the game is broken into four chapters that chronicle the adventures of your nameless Hero Character’s JRPG party as they pursue the personal missions that lead them to cross paths with you and join up when you finally take control of the main kid in chapter five. This is a novel concept, one that I wish had inspired other things more directly. This is the kind of idea that I feel should be brazenly stolen rather than referenced as a cool thing that one venerable beloved thing did. It’s pretty sick and IMPORTANTLY I don’t think it’s really taken advantage of as an idea.
There’s a degree to which this eases you into the game, starting you with a character who is really tanky with no access to magic and an optionally recruitable heal guy, chapter two giving you a balanced party, and chapter four skewing you heavily towards squishy mage characters against the toughest enemies yet (I’ll get back around to chapter 3). Each of these mini-adventures is fun, and cute, and they do a fun job of introducing you to various parts of the world and previews of their problems and cultures before you’ll eventually get the chance to really address them and visit them in the interconnected way that previous DQ games have, and watching that world map stitch itself together as you go through chapter 5 is genuinely special in a way I’m not sure any other game can replicate exactly. They do go on maybe a little bit too long, and starting every character flatly at level 1 in each scenario does tune things a little needlessly grindy in a series that hasn’t had any problem being breezy before now but has the dark cloud runtimes of games like DQ7 and 11 looming ever nearer.
The real issue I take with these chapters, however, is that they feel like wasted opportunities, largely because chapter 3 is such a unique standout compared to the rest. In chapter 3 you play as Torneko, a middle-aged merchant guy who has inexplicably become a mascot for the series and the star of the first ever Mystery Dungeon game, as he works at his small town’s weapons shop and dreams of one day opening his own. There IS a pretty normal DQ adventure here, sort of, but there’s not really an enemy you’re driving to defeat or a primary antagonist, and I spent a lot of time at the top of this chapter working at the shop for money. Guys come in and say hey will you sell me this item and I say yeah of course. Sometimes they come in and sell me a crossbow just like I’ve done a million times in these games, and I give them a good price. Sometimes a guy will come in and sell a REALLY nice sword and if I can afford it from my meager earning’s I’ll buy that and equip it myself to eliminate the need for the grind if I can, seeing as Torneko is not really a combat guy. He can inspect items though and appraise their value, maybe squeeze a few more coins out of them than they’re worth.
Because that’s his whole thing, while you are still diving through dungeons and stuff you’re doing it in service of raising funds to rent space for your storefront, to loot nice weapons and armor to fulfill an order, to stock your new store well enough to raise enough money to repair an important tunnel. The true final boss of the chapter is Getting Sixty Thousand Dollars. It’s rudimentary, as it necessarily had to be given the hardware the original version of the game was developed for, but it does succeed at playing out like an extremely prototypical version of the burgeoning item shop RPG genre, with a flavor unlike anything else in the game. It made it feel really weird that none of the other warmup chapters took the opportunity to try stuff like that; Ragnar is an important knight in active military service, but his mission puts him in a position to behave like a normal JRPG guy. Meena and Maya are professional performers, a fortuneteller and a famous dancer, who are seeking revenge for the murder of their father and their quest makes them cross some dangerous and important people, but they never try to use their professional credits to go undercover and get close to anyone of something; there’s no element of the context of their lives that plays into their story, we’re just told these things about them and then do a JRPG adventure with them for a few hours before we switch over to the main game.
It’s hard to hold these things against the game too much because as I’ve mentioned I do understand that I may be asking for a lot of complexity from a game that was probably already pushing at the seams of its hardware, and beyond that this is just a fun game. Everything that’s good about the writing and presentation in Dragon Quest 3 is still good here, better even a lot of the time. There are more creative puzzles and there’s better dungeon variety. So the fact that I spent this whole thing moaning shouldn’t indicate that I didn’t have a good time, only that I’m mourning the much more interesting game I got a brief taste of here that, to my knowledge, this series would never approach again.
2 Comments
Someday I’ll play more than two hours of earthbound. And then i might even play mother 3
MeowPewterMeow
2 years ago